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Monday, August 7, 2017

GreenStaxx Ready to Begin New Era of Multifamily Construction

Until now there has been no way to build one replicable multifamily building fitting all sites, making it impossible to capture the benefits of scale and repetition.

GreenStaxx, a Cambridge, MA company, has successfully addressed this challenge by creating a system of dwelling unit stacks for use in multiple projects. The digital unit stacks are configured for modular production, and fit into a grid that can be adjusted to any specific site dimension.

The resulting highly refined plans are project contract documents for pricing and permitting, and can quickly transform into shop drawings for factory production.Gwendolen Noyes is a partner at Oaktree Development and senior vice president and COO at Greenstaxx, a building system that aims to change the way housing is created.“There’s old-school thinking that anything pre-fab is going to be flimsy and cheap, which is absolutely the diametric opposite of what the situation can be with modular housing,” she said. “Beyond that, the Greenstaxx system can further the whole process of industrializing housing by bringing in repetition … If [the construction] is done over and over again, you can perfect it. You can reduce the cost.”

Greenstaxx also allows for projects to be completed “mind-blowingly fast,” said Mike Hoban, owner of Hoban Communications. Case in point: Using Greenstaxx modules, Oaktree Development finished a 53-unit, mixed-income project in Reading, from conception to completion, in just 14 months. “It just doesn’t happen that fast,” Hoban said.

A 68-unit project in Newton, set to begin construction next spring, will be the first that uses Greenstaxx’s “fully integrated system” – that is, a system that brings together the architect, developer, modular manufacturer, contractor and all needed contacts.